"The Best TV Show That's Ever Been"

So says Amy Poehler, and she isn't alone in thinking Cheers is pretty much perfect. On the thirtieth anniversary of the show's premiere, GQ sat down with just about everyone who made it and asked them about creating Sam and Diane, the birth of Norm!, Woody Harrelson's one-night stands, and many other secrets of what became TV's funniest guy show of all time

Clockwise from top center, Colasanto and Danson; Danson and Long; Grammar and Neuwirth; Wendt, Perlman, and Ratzenberger (front); Danson and Alley; Harrelson (left).

On September 30, 1982, NBC premiered a new sitcom called Cheers, a smartly written show about a bar owned by a retired relief pitcher named Sam Malone. Created by director James Burrows and writer-producers Glen and Les Charles, Cheers would become the last blast of pre-irony prime-time. There was no callous snark, no deconstructive riffs, and only a handful of time-stamped pop-culture references. For the most part, people sat around a bar and talked. But despite its elemental simplicity, the show sparked a quiet revolution in the way TV comedy was produced, with each half-hour episode playing into a soap-style arc of love, death, and bar-bets that would go on for eleven seasons. "It was something bigger than a sitcom," says early Cheers writer-producer Sam Simon, who'd later help develop The Simpsons. "It was a sweeping narrative. [Nowadays], producers sit down with the network at the beginning of the year and talk about the arc of the show. That's because of Glen and Les and Jimmy."

After an initial season of low ratings, Cheers would grow into a Nielsens-climbing, Emmy-gobbling cultural smash, thanks in large part to the show's central relationship, between Sam and his "aspiring poet" waitress, Diane Chambers, who drove each other crazy via a series of hook-ups, break-ups, and occasional slap-fests. At a time when just a few million viewers can make a TV hit, it's hard to understate just how mega Cheers was. By 1993, at the end of its eleven-season run, it was earning a now unheard-of 26 million viewers per week. (The top network sitcom today, The Big Bang Theory, averages 18 million; cable sitcoms get by on a few million.) It was that rare pop-culture phenomenon that seemed to appeal to everyone, from the guy who recognized himself in Norm, to one of the America's greatest novelists, Kurt Vonnegut. The author was a fan and so was Prince and so were politicians Michael Dukakis and John Kerry, who both made cameos. The Bull & Finch, the Boston bar shown at the beginning of each episode, racked up millions of dollars in tie-in and tourism money. "And they're still pouring in there," says Dukakis. "With all due respect to Bunker Hill and Faneuil Hall, I think it continues to be the most popular attraction in Boston."

Even if you've never seen Cheers (and, by the way, all 275 episodes are now streaming on Netflix) you've seen its lineage. Amy Poehler and Mike Schur (creators of Parks & Recreation), Bill Lawrence (Scrubs), Dan Harmon (Community), and Shawn Ryan (The Shield) are all fans, if not downright scholars, of Cheers. "I hope and assume that every good comedy writer, no matter the age, has a moment where they discover how great Cheers is," says Poehler, who regularly watches Cheers episodes in her Parks & Recreation trailer. "And I would encourage any young person getting into comedy to sit down and watch it."

Three decades after the show's premiere, nearly 40 Cheers cast members, writers, and producers talked to GQ about what might just be the greatest sitcom of all time (no offense, Seinfeld and The Simpsons). Here's the story of how three guys walked into a bar and created a classic.

In the late '70s, budding TV director James Burrows and Glen and Les Charles, two English-major brothers from Nevada, were working on the sitcom Taxi. Toward the end of its run, their agent suggested the three stop working for others and create a show of their own.

Glen Charles (co-creator): Taxi was very difficult, because we were serving the executive producers, and we were trying to serve our own idea of what was funny and what was a good story. It kind of splits your focus. Jimmy was an in-house director, and we were producers, and we had a lot of communication together.

Les Charles (co-creator): We'd always gotten along extremely well. I think we felt like contemporaries—like we were in the same college class, and suffered a lot of the same injuries and blows to our egos.

Glen Charles: We were a Jew and two Mormons, so we kind of banded together. We felt persecuted [laughs].

Jimmy Burrows(co-creator/director): We wanted to call our company that: "A Jew and two Mormons." But unfortunately, it was taken [laughs].

Glen Charles: Fawlty Towers was a favorite at that time, and so we started talking about hotel stories, and we found that a lot of the action was happening in the hotel bar. We actually thought of that while we were in a bar: "Why would anyone ever leave here?"

Burrows: We also knew that we wanted to have a Tracy-Hepburn relationship.

Les Charles: We talked about putting this bar out in the desert somewhere, or in a small town, but once we were looking at a city, we immediately went to Boston. It hadn't been used very much on television, and we wanted a city with some charm—a city that would have that English-style sort of pub in it. [Plus], it was a sports-crazy city. Everything seemed right about it.

When we went in to sell the show, we had to give some prototype the network could latch onto. [We mentioned] those light-beer commercials, where they used to show a bunch of athletes hanging around in a bar. That wasn't what we had in mind at all, but we thought that would get the thing rolling.

Michael Zinberg(development executive, NBC): When they came in and [pitched the show], you could feel the room shudder. "What kind of show would be in a bar? How do we handle all the alcohol?" But the Charles brothers very clearly said, "This isn't about the place. This is about a family; it just happens not to be a group of brothers and sisters."

Warren Littlefield (vice president, NBC): The network was really hungry. CBS was in a renaissance of comedy, with M*A*S*H, One Day at a Time, and The Jeffersons. ABC had Mork & Mindy, Barney Miller, and Taxi. So the desire to work with Burrows-Charles was really to change NBC's identity, to say, "We want to be in the sophisticated-adult-comedy business."

Burrows: When I got the first draft of the pilot from Les and Glen, I said to my wife, "Oh, my God, these guys have brought radio back to television." They had written this smart, intellectual story. I'd never seen anything like that on TV before—just guys sitting around, talking.

The first parts to be cast were reformed alcoholic and unrepentant babe hound Sam Malone—who was originally conceived as a "Stanley Kowalski type"—and Diane Chambers, the newly dumped know-it-all who, in the pilot, is reduced to waiting tables at Cheers. Burrows and the Charles' brothers subjected the finalists—Shelley Long, Ted Danson, former football player Fred Dryer (Hunter), William Devane (Knots Landing), Julia Duffy (Newhart) and film actress Lisa Eichhorn—to a grueling month of audtions, with Long and Danson the ultimate winners.

Glen Charles: We wanted to introduce the bar and the people in it through Diane's eyes. She was the audience's guide.

Shelley Long (Diane Chambers): I was doing the movie Night Shift when I read Cheers. I was not looking for a sitcom, because the philosophy at that point was that you had to make a choice: Were you going to do movies or TV? You couldn't cross over. Then this script came along, and it was the best TV script I'd ever read.

Ted Danson (Sam Malone): I was actively looking for work. I got called in at the last second to do a guest spot onTaxi, and Jimmy, Les, and Glen were on the Paramount lot, putting together Cheers. I ran over and met them. It was one of the few times that I didn't doubt myself—even though it took a month to get the part.

Long: Before the audition, I grabbed the dress I'd been planning to wear, only to realize that the waistband had been stretched to double it's normal size. But I didn't have an alternative and I was running late, so I just put a belt on and hoped it would be okay. When I met Ted, I realized too late that it was so blousy that I was giving him quite the view. I think it got us off to a really great start.